Some commercial installations for aspirated smoke detectors require a larger area of coverage than single channel products are capable of meeting. In order to cover a larger area, a multichannel smoke detector is needed. For cost purposes, it is desirable to only use one smoke sensing chamber. But, if air is being sampled from multiple pipes to the one chamber, the user still needs to know which pipe (channel) the smoke came from. This can be done mechanically via valves and actuators, but this is complex, slow, and expensive.